Facebook advertising is a hot topic! Most of us know that it's important to be spending money on Facebook advertising to increase our reach and audience, but we also know there is so much more to it than just hitting "Boost Post" and paying Facebook.

Taylor Manning joined me on the Social Media Simplified podcast and we had a chat about Facebook ads - it's such a broad topic we could probably have three more chats about it (and maybe we will!)

Here are a few of the highlights from our discussion:

Boost vs Ads Manager vs Power Editor

There are multiple ways that you can set up Facebook advertising - one is to hit "Boost Post" right from your page and get more exposure. Another is to use the Ads Manager, which you can find easily in your side bar. Power Editor needs to be installed and gives you even more power behind your advertising options.

What should you pick and why? Boost Post is the easiest option, then Ads Manager, and then Power Editor. If you're looking for easier, go with Boost Post or Ads Manager. But why would you pick Power Editor? It literally has more power. It gives you access to more options, let's you include more text and gives you access to a lot more insight information.

Power Behind Facebook Ads

Why should you be using Facebook ads? Because you can reach your current audience and you can reach new audiences because of how specially you can drill down with your ad targeting.

Step one is to really know who you're talking to - this is why understanding your audience is so important.

You can target ads to people based on things like age, gender, marital status, location, etc., but beyond that you can also target people based on their interests. For example, you can send an ad to someone who likes a specific page.

So, let's say you run a website that sell recipes, you could target ads to people who like the pages of big magazines that share a lot of recipes, because you know that those audiences are fairly likely to also be your audience.

Pixels

Pixels - pixels are a piece of code that Facebook gives you that you can put on your website. This helps you know if your ads are converting well and it also gives you the opportunity to target ads specifically to people who have already been to your website.

Pixels are a really great feature of advertising on Facebook, but one people often skip because they get scared of the code side of things (this is where hiring someone might be a good idea.)

Advertising to warm leads

There are several ways you can advertise specifically to people who are already paying attention to you (they are more likely to pay attention than people who have never heard of you).

A few ways to advertise specifically to people include: targeting ads to the people who already like your page, targeting ads to people who have been to your website (this is done with the pixel), and by uploading your email list to Facebook and having ads run to anyone who has a Facebook account that uses that email account.

How much money should you spend?

How much you should spend and what is a good conversion price to get someone to do what you're wanting them to do is a tricky question because there are so many variables.

The simple answer is always the least specific answer, but you should know that if you can, spending more at the beginning of an ad campaign will give you better results on testing than spending less, therefore, $25/day is a great place to start. If you can't spend that much $5 is still okay.

What is a decent amount to spend on a conversion? Again - this can vary, but the simple answer is that $1 is often pretty good. Some people spend a lot more per conversion, but this depends on how popular the audience is (if lots of people are trying to advertise to the same audience, it gets more expensive to reach them).

The important piece is to look at how your ad is performing and you can change and tweak as you go (something you could never do with traditional advertising).

We barely scratched the surface with Facebook ads in this interview, but there is a lot of great introductory information shared. If you have more questions for Taylor, check out the links below!